PHIL 26101 - Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School

Course Credit: 1
(GERS, PSCI)
CRITICAL THEORY OF THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL: In the early twentieth century, a group of intellectuals broadly known as the Frankfurt School sought to move beyond standard class-based (i.e. Marxist) approaches in social analysis to investigate the unique challenges posed by capitalism, modern bureaucracy and mass politics. Against the backdrop of Nazism, Stalinism and monopoly capitalism, the Frankfurt School asked two questions: How did we get here? And, where does emancipation lie? Influenced by Hegel, Marx, Weber, Nietzsche and Freud, they drew from a wide array of intellectual disciplines and theoretical approaches in an effort to diagnose the ruined, pathological world of modernity. Their studies - which go under the general name of “Critical Theory” - were among the first that can be properly labeled interdisciplinary, encompassing insights from numerous intellectual approaches. The course will consider the strengths and limitations of Critical Theory through close readings of the School’s seminal texts, including Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and Essay on Liberation, among others. This course fills a Political Science Special Topics in Political Theory Requirement. [AH]